Congratulations to Raquel Salas Rivera, whose antes que isla es volcán / earlier than Island is Volcano (Beacon Press, 2022) simply received the Juan Felipe Herrera Greatest Poetry E book Award within the 2022 Latino E book Awards. [The cover art is by Xavier Valcárcel.]
Description (Beacon Press): Raquel Salas Rivera’s star has been rising within the poetry world for years, and this, his sixth e-book, guarantees to cement his standing as probably the most vital poets working right now. In sharp, crystalline verses, introduced in each Spanish and English, antes que isla seems to the decolonial way forward for Puerto Rico and is thus composed of questions—most pressingly the query of its independence or statehood. Construction is certainly one of Salas Rivera’s strongest instruments, and he unfurls collection after collection of poems that construct in depth: one which casts Puerto Rico because the island of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, one other that imagines a multiverse of potentialities for Puerto Rico’s destiny, a 3rd wherein the poet calls for his proper to a future and its quick distribution. These verses are rigorous and complicated, partaking with literary and political principle, but additionally charismatic and quotable (“received’t you be sorry? / received’t you want you had a boss? / received’t you get stressed / with all that freedom?”) The islands of Puerto Rico have been as soon as volcanos, Salas Rivera reminds us, and that explosive vitality nonetheless burns throughout the folks there.
Daniel Borzutzky writes: “To dream different worlds within the face of colonial apocalypse. To interrogate what independence actually means within the face of political and financial abandonment. To depart behind the museum of accumulation. To think about a future when the long run has been assassinated, when our bodies and houses and streets and loves and lives are erased. To think about how the unimaginable can emerge from the damaged sea and the damaged sky and the damaged mountains. To think about we would transcend the perpetual state of emergency we discover ourselves in. To think about we would exit the perpetual state of disaster inflicted by the earth, the state, and the financial institution.
This imagining is what the poems – the poem – that’s earlier than island is volcano – generously and powerfully presents us. Since the tertiary, probably the most vital books of our time, Raquel Salas Rivera, has been documenting—with acuity, and readability, and wonder—the colonial gap, creating life-giving books, in a number of languages, and channeling a number of universes, to reward us the phrases we’d like as we keep at bay the nations they ship to kill us.”
For extra info, see http://www.beacon.org/antes-que-isla-es-volcan-before-island-is-volcano-P1775.aspx and https://www.latinobookawards.org/uploads/b/7bf35910-027b-11ea-bb26-f1fe282c6469/45c9be40-f3f1-11ec-8bdd-97aa18f436cd.pdf
Additionally see https://www.raquelsalasrivera.web/